Books

In Ghost Town, the first fictional offering in Bloomsbury's "The Writer and the City" series, British-born author Patrick McGrath turns his neo-Gothic gaze on Gotham. Three talesset in the 18th, 19th, and 21st centuriesdescribe a New York wherein murder, madness, and quasi-incestuous alliances prove quite as endemic and perpetual as insalubrious bars and unaffordable real estate.

Just as the city itself is prone to contradiction and stark disparity (rich/poor, uptown/downtown, Yankees/Mets), it's possible to admire McGrath's macabre manner and project and yet find the book wanting. The grotesque trappings are presentinsane asylums, cholera outbreaks, the odd unburied skullbut they serve only to suggest what other, better, more fully enfleshed narratives might have offered. In an unhappy irony, the stories are ghosts themselves.

photo: WordFest

McGrath: The ghost of a smile

Details

Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now
By Patrick McGrath Bloomsbury,
243 pp., $16.95

"The Year of the Gibbet," for example, takes place in the same era as McGrath's Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution and often uncomfortably echoes it, seeming a frail twin rather than a tale in its own right. "Ground Zero," a story of analytics and obsession just after 9-11, attempts surprise and paradox but telegraphs its twists with a crushing obviousness. "Julius," set in the mid 19th century, fares best, but its patriarchs, artist models, and portrait painters might have benefited from a broader canvas. McGrath's navigated the short-story form before, as evinced by 1988's Blood and Water, but in Manhattan's winding streets, he finds himself a little lost.